World professional boxing has no one controlling body that is universally recognized. This situation had its origins in the United States in 1920 when two organizations were established: the National Boxing Association, a private body, and the New York State Athletic Commission, a state agency. Divided control led to competing organizations’ sometimes recognizing different boxers as world champions at the same time. In Europe the ruling body was the International Boxing Union, which in 1948 became the European Boxing Union. Several attempts were subsequently made to induce all major professional boxing organizations to agree to the formation of one international ruling body, but to little avail. In the early 1960s the World Boxing Council (WBC) was formed, and the National Boxing Association changed its name to the World Boxing Association (WBA). The International Boxing Federation (IBF) was established in 1983, which added to an already convoluted situation. Since the 1980s it has been common for most weight divisions to have three so-called world champions, and this has considerably diluted the championship class in boxing.

The lack of one unified governing body has also seriously hampered attempts to reform boxing. The sport’s chaotic organization makes it nearly impossible to implement safety measures, such as requiring stringent qualifications for ringside physicians, or to alter systemic problems that lead to corruption, such as the practice of permitting those who are promoting a fight to manage one or both of the boxers appearing in that fight. If a promoter or fighter is banned from fighting in one jurisdiction, the fact that the fight can be moved to another venue, which is ruled by a different group, makes avoidance of regulations easy.

Weight divisions

During the 19th and again at the beginning of the 20th century, the popularity of boxing brought about the formation of weight divisions other than the heavyweight class to eliminate the handicap of smaller contestants’ having to concede excessive weight to their opponents. Some of these weight divisions originated in the United States, others in Great Britain.

There were traditionally eight weight divisions in men’s boxing. More divisions were added until professional governing bodies now recognize a total of 17 weight classes. The upper limits of these classes are delimited as follows:

In all world and national title fights, weight limits must be strictly observed, although fighters are often allowed by contract to weigh-in the day before a fight. If a boxer is over the limit, he is normally given a short time in which to make the stipulated weight. If he still fails, the bout usually proceeds, but if the overweight fighter wins the bout, the title for which he was fighting is declared vacant.

Because there is no universally accepted world ruling body for professional boxing, each country has its own set of rules, and in the United States there are different rules in different states. Generally bouts take place in a “ring” that is 18 to 22 feet (5.5 to 6.7 metres) square and surrounded by four strands of rope. Professional bouts may be scheduled to last from 4 to 12 rounds of three minutes’ duration, though two-minute rounds are commonly used in women’s bouts and in some bouts held in Great Britain. Since the late 1920s, professional championship bouts traditionally lasted 15 rounds, but by the late 1980s the WBC, WBA, and IBF championships were all being scheduled for 12 rounds.

A referee is stationed inside the ring with the boxers and regulates the bout. In some jurisdictions the referee scores the contest along with two judges outside the ring. In most jurisdictions, however, the referee does not participate in the judging, and three ringside officials score the bout. The officials award points to each boxer for each round, and a boxer must win on two of the three scorecards to earn a decision victory. In Olympic bouts five judges score the fight electronically by pushing a button whenever a punch is believed to have landed on a boxer. No punch is registered as a hit unless at least three judges press their buttons within a second of each other. Padded gloves, ranging from 8 to 10 ounces (227 to 283 grams) in weight, are worn by the boxers.

A bout ends in a knockout when a boxer is knocked down and cannot get up by the count of 10. A fight can be stopped by a technical knockout (TKO) when a boxer is deemed by the referee (and sometimes the ringside physician) to be unable to defend himself properly, when a boxer is deemed to have sustained a serious injury, or when a boxer or his seconds decide he should not continue. A bout may also end in a decision when the bout has gone the scheduled number of rounds and the scoring officials decide the winner. Several conditions can cause a bout to end in a draw: all three judges awarding identical scores to both contestants results in a draw, as does two of three judges awarding opponents identical scores, regardless of the third judge’s score; further, two of the three judges giving the decision to opposing contestants and the third judge’s scorecard being evenly divided between the opponents leads to a draw. In a “no contest” the bout is declared a nullity because of a premature and inconclusive end, such as one of the participants being unable to continue owing to a cut caused by an accidental clash of heads early in the fight. A bout may also end in disqualification.

The rules governing amateur boxing are similar in the United States, Great Britain, and continental Europe but differ substantially from those governing professional boxing. Amateur bouts are normally three rounds in duration, and the boxers wear protective headgear. Olympic bouts changed from three rounds of three minutes to four rounds of two minutes for the Games at Sydney in 2000. The referee only supervises the boxing, while three to five ringside judges score the bout. The rules are also more stringently enforced in amateur boxing, and disqualification is more common than in professional boxing.

Techniques

An effective offense depends on the ability to throw punches quickly and to place them strategically so as to penetrate the opponent’s guard. Defensive tactics include parrying or warding off punches with one’s upraised arms and gloves, moving the head evasively up and down (“bobbing”) and side to side (“weaving”), and bending or twisting one’s head and upper body out of the blow’s path. Footwork is important to both offense and defense. The two generally recognized stances are “orthodox” and “southpaw.” The former has the left hand and the left foot forward, the latter the right hand and the right foot forward—the foot or hand that is forward is known as the lead. Boxers using orthodox stances ordinarily are right-handed and rely on that hand for power, using the left hand to jab and hook; the converse is true of southpaw boxers, who are usually left-handed. In either stance the lead hand is extended forward in front of the body and the other hand is held near the chin for protection, the chin is tucked into the chest, and the shoulders are hunched. There are individual variations.

There are four basic punches: the jab, hook, uppercut, and straight right (straight left for a southpaw), which is sometimes referred to as a “cross.” All other punches are modifications of these basic punches. The jab, whether thrown from an orthodox or a southpaw stance, is a straight punch delivered with the lead hand, which moves directly out from the shoulder. The hook, also thrown with the lead hand, is a short lateral movement of arm and fist, with elbow bent and wrist twisted inward at the moment of impact. The uppercut is an upward blow delivered from the direction of the toes with either hand. The straight right or left is thrown at shoulder level with the back hand, usually as a follow-up to a jab from the other hand.

Styles

In bare-knuckle fighting the emphasis was on the power of the punch, since bouts usually ended only when one contestant could not continue. The hands were held in front of the body in no particular position, and footwork was practically nonexistent. With the advent of padded gloves and contests decided on points, boxing skills and footwork became more important. James J. Corbett was the first modern heavyweight to concentrate on technique. Ten years after Corbett lost the title, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson showed that he too could box as well as punch. The heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey enjoyed tremendous popularity because he was an aggressive fighter with an explosive assault. Dempsey fought from a crouch, bobbing and weaving to leave as little of himself exposed as possible. The heavyweight champion Joe Louis perfected the “stalking” style, a method of patiently pursuing his opponent until he came within range to deliver damaging blows.

Until Muhammad Ali, heavyweights were not expected to move quickly. At his peak, however, Ali was the fastest and arguably the most skillful heavyweight champion of all time. He danced around the ring with his arms sometimes dangling at his side, his legs ready to take him into punching range or out of harm’s way at will. Although Ali did not possess a devastating punch, his hand speed was extraordinary, and he dominated many fights by delivering rapid sequences of blows. Though style remains a matter of individual choice, swift lateral movement, good defensive head movement, combination punching, and effective counterpunching have, to a large degree, become the most important aspects of modern boxing technique.

Boxing in art, literature, and film

For such a brutal trade, boxing has attracted more than its share of artists and writers. Of course, it may be more accurate to say that it is boxing’s seminaked display of aggression that accounts for its appeal. If all life is ultimately a Darwinian struggle for survival, then boxing at least has the virtue of being open about it. Boxing is also said to foster the “manly” virtues of discipline and fortitude. According to the duke of Wellington, boxing “tends to produce and keep up that natural undaunted bravery and intrepidity which has enabled our armies to conquer in many a hard-fought battle.” Whatever its psychological hold, the sport has always inspired wonder and admiration, as well as repugnance, moving the artist to pick up pen, brush, chisel, or camera.

One of the earliest depictions of boxers appears on a Minoan vase from Crete c. 1500 bc. Almost 800 years later Homer recounted a boxing match in the 23rd book of the Iliad (see above), and, in a neat bit of parallelism, the sport became part of the 23rd Olympiad in 688 bc. Later Plato referred to boxing in the Republic and the dialogue Gorgias; Virgil, echoing Homer, included a boxing match in the Aeneid (see above). Pindar composed poems for Olympic champions, as in the Olympian ode written for Diagoras of Rhodes excerpted here:

But, Father Zeus, you who rule over the ridges of Atabyrium, grant honor to the hymn ordained in praise of an Olympian victor, and to the man who has found excellence as a boxer, and grant to him honoured grace in the eyes of both citizens and strangers. For he walks a straight course on a road that hates arrogance, knowing clearly the sound prophetic wisdom of his good ancestors.

Greek and Roman art frequently depict boxing. Greek vases portray many different types of blows and postures and often show blood pouring from a boxer’s nose and cuts on his face. The life-size seated boxer (dating to the 1st century bc) now in the Roman National Museum in Rome wears superbly detailed sharp thongs on his hands, and his battered face, broken nose, and cauliflower ears show the effects of such fighting. The brutal and sinister forms of the Roman caestus (glove) frequently appear in small bronzes and in Roman mosaics.

After boxing died out with the gladiatorial games in the 5th century ad, it naturally disappeared from the literary and artistic canvas. When the sport resurfaced in 17th-century England, artists and writers soon gravitated to it. William Hogarth painted the first British champion, James Figg, and Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift attended Figg’s exhibitions in London. Early in the next century, Lord Byron and John Keats professed themselves admirers of the sport, while William Hazlitt’s essay The Fight (1821) made it legitimate material for men of letters. In 1812 a London journalist, Pierce Egan, wrote a history of British boxing, Boxiana, whose highly stylized prose very likely influenced a young reader by the name of Charles Dickens. Both Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray attended the famous fight between the American John C. Heenan and the British champion Tom Sayers in 1860, and Thackeray wrote a rather silly but endearing poem about it, A Lay of Ancient London. George Bernard Shaw devoted a novel to boxing, Cashel Byron’s Profession (1883), which became the play The Admirable Bashville (1903). Arthur Conan Doyle not only made sure that Sherlock Holmes was a good amateur pugilist, he also wrote a half dozen stories about boxers under the title The Croxley Master and Other Tales of the Ring and Camp (1910). Even the poet laureate John Masefield devoted some stanzas to boxing in The Everlasting Mercy (1911). Here a boxer’s seconds (a second assists or supports a boxer or duelist) try to ensure that their fighter will be ready for his next round:

They drove (a dodge that never fails) A pin beneath my finger nails. They poured what seemed a running beck Of cold spring water down my neck; Jim with a lancet quick as flies Lowered the swelling round my eyes. They sluiced my legs and fanned my face Through all that blessed minute’s grace; They gave my calves a thorough kneading, They salved my cuts and stopped the bleeding. A gulp of liquor dulled the pain, And then the flasks clinked again.

Americans resisted boxing until the end of the 19th century, but, once the sport had gained a foothold, men who wrote about boxing often seemed as plentiful as fighters themselves. Among them were Jack London, Dashiell Hammet, H.C. Witwer, Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, James T. Farrell, Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw, Budd Schulberg, and Norman Mailer.

In fact, it is likely that more literary writing, as opposed to pure journalism, has been spent on boxing than on any other sport, and, indeed, on rare occasions, gifted journalists have blurred the line between literary writing and sportswriting. A.J. Liebling’s reportage in The Sweet Science (1956), for example, appeals both to writers and sports fans, and Heywood Broun’s newspaper column “The Orthodox Champion” (1922) managed to both celebrate and poke fun at the way boxing and literature are often conjoined. To understand why writers, especially male writers (though not exclusively, Joyce Carol Oates being an exception), are drawn to the sport, it is enough to know that boxers, more than any other athlete, throw into relief the writer’s own sedentary and introspective profession. Bluntly put: one writes, the other fights. The boxer engages in a visible struggle, with a designated opponent, whose outcome is usually (though not always) resoundingly clear, while the writer’s struggle is always with himself, and success is hardly the product of a unanimous decision. Moreover, if the writer frets that his own experience is somehow less vital or real than that of the man of action, boxing can symbolize this insecurity.

Given boxers’ well-developed physiques and the visceral reality of physical combat, such men and the profession they engage in are a natural subject for painters and photographers. The French painter Théodore Géricault and the English painter John Constable portrayed boxers, while such well-known Regency caricaturists as Thomas Rowlandson and Robert and George Cruikshank trained their jaundiced eyes on the London Prize Ring. American George Bellows vividly portrayed boxing matches in Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909). Bellows’s 1924 lithograph of Luis Firpo knocking Jack Dempsey out of the ring is perhaps the most famous of all boxing scenes. Other American painters of boxing include Thomas Eakins and James Chapin, both of whom ably rendered the movement, power, and grace of men boxing, as well as the fatigue and pathos that often attends the aftermath.

These same dramatic qualities appealed to filmmakers. In fact, the very first motion picture using “actors” was a boxing exhibition filmed by Thomas Edison on June 16, 1894, using the Edison kinetoscope. And in 1897, the championship fight between Gentleman Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons became the first sporting event to be captured on film. The power of such films was attested to when interstate commerce in footage of Jack Johnson beating Jim Jeffries (July 4, 1910) was prohibited by federal law. (The fact that Johnson was an African American and Jim Jeffries a white boxer had more than a little to do with it.) Johnson’s life would eventually be the subject of another boxing film, The Great White Hope (1970, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Howard Sackler). As for fictional movies about boxers, they outnumber all other sports films. Although most early fight films followed a set pattern of a poor boy who battles his way out of the slums only to fall prey to women and gangsters, their popularity really depended on the built-in tension in every boxing match. Not only is there danger with every punch thrown, there is anxiety in who shall prevail; and when two boxers represent different constituencies of class, ethnicity, or nationality, a championship fight becomes all the more significant.

A short list of notable fight films includes Rouben Mamoulian’s Golden Boy (1939); Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), about an ambitious Jewish fighter’s rise from poverty; Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956); Mark Robson’s Champion (1949), loosely based on Ring Lardner’s short story of the same name, and The Harder They Fall (1956), inspired by the rise and fall of Primo Carnera; Kurt Newman’s The Ring (1952), about a young Mexican American’s fight for respect in and out of the ring; Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962, adapted from Rod Serling’s Playhouse 90 production of 1956); John Huston’s Fat City (1972), which captured the unglamorous world of small-time boxers; Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), based upon the life of the fighter Jake La Motta; Sakamoto Junji’s Dotsuitaru nen (1989, Knockout), based upon the autobiography of young welterweight Akai Hidekazu, who suffers brain damage from boxing but eventually returns to the ring (Akai plays himself in this film); the five popular but highly artificial Rocky movies (1976–90), which tell the story of a decent man who fights for a living; Kitano Takeshi’s Kidzu ritān (1996, Kids Return), about two Japanese teen bullies who take up boxing and learn about life in the process; Katya Bankowsky’s Shadow Boxers (1999), a documentary featuring Lucia Rijker; Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight (2000), an award-winning film about female pugilists; and Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004), a drama that focuses on the relationship between a female boxer and her aging trainer. In books or in film, the climactic match often means salvation or redemption—a time-tested formula hard to resist.